flow battery report
In this report, Foresight Transitions, with help from Swanbarton and Southampton University, mapped out the performance and commercial aspects of flow batteries, and assessed their applicability to deployment and manufacture in developing economies (DE, here defined as countries in Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia).
Chapter 3 covers the wide range of flow batteries that have been developed up to early commercial stage, showing that the architectures, performance metrics and targeted applications vary widely. Indeed, some FB are aiming to compete with Li-ion in the daily cycling required for PV integration, while others would be more suitable for longer duration storage, and hence competing with hydrogen or other technologies. Broadly speaking, vanadium FB and hybrid FB employing metal plating appear best suited for the daily cycling market.
Chapter 4 covers the challenges and opportunities of deploying FB in DE, particularly around logistics and environmental aspects such as dust and elevated temperatures.
Chapter 5 comprises a discussion of key market drivers in DE, followed by an analysis of specific country market potentials across multiple metrics. South Africa scored the highest, followed by Indonesia, then jointly India and Thailand. This finding was validated through agreement with the actual observed deployment of FB in the geographical scope.
Chapter 6 covers the manufacturing aspects of FB, which are distinguished from those of Li-ion by an assembly-type approach rather than a single "gigafactory". This means that DE looking to add value locally could start with simpler components such as injection moulded stack frames, and work up to more complex components like graphitic electrodes. Hybrid metal plating FB may be favourable as they typically do not require highly technical ionic membranes. The investment scale of FB manufacturing sites was also found to be two orders of magnitude lower than that of Li-ion, meaning that FB present a reduced risk investment. By a similar assessment as before, India was found to be the most promising country for manufacturing, followed by Thailand. Again, this was validated by real-world observations.
Overall key findings include:
FB are highly diverse, with vanadium FB and hybrid metal plating FB most suited to the immediate market.
Temperature tolerance is a key metric where FB could outperform Li-ion, but there is a lack of transparency around the actual performance of FB at high temperatures at the system level.
Lifetime data for systems other than the vanadium FB are lacking. This amplifies the above case for piloting.
FB present an accessible route into value addition in the energy storage market, and items like bipolar electrodes and stack frames (common to all FB) would be a sensible place to start.